Links for July 2nd
Yoko Ono, jokes, Shohei Ohtani, Tomi Obaro's debut novel, Benjamin Franklin, Widow Basquiat
Hope you’ve had a smooth week amid the rolling chaos through which we live. Here’s the beach!
Links
This Louis Menand piece about Yoko Ono’s art career very worth checking out. She’s a bit of a figure in his (great) book The Free World (the book with the amazing history of early paperbacks) — and this reads like he expanded on the thought. She was a big deal long before she met John Lennon! Thanks to friend of the newsletter, Miriam Elder, for this rec.
This is a bunch of goofy jokes that comedians say are their favorite (like Kenan Thompson and so forth by name), but some of them are pretty funny.
This writer got reported on Instagram for bullying a brand (by making fun of it pretty sharply), which she admits she shouldn’t have done, and from there, goes into some interesting considerations about parenting, resilience, speech, online archives, etc.
Absolutely incredible political ad here (it’s the one-two-three of the pig sound effect, pronunciation of “prosciutto,” and subtle shift in body language that turns this transcendent).
Stuff to look at:
a. A library-esque room!
b. Shohei Ohtani taking signs off the pitch com is pretty great.
Light book commentary
First off, my former colleague Tomi Obaro wrote a novel, Dele Weds Destiny, that I just tore through this week. Despite the wedding in the title, and the setting of a wedding in Lagos, the book concerns a decades-long friendship between three women: first in 2015 when they’re mothers in their fifties together for the first time in decades, and then in the 1980s when they were college students and young adults in different parts of Nigeria. A very sharply observed book — but in a warm way! — about individuals and friendship and how they form and how people change.
Additionally, I realized I left out The Widow Basquiat, which I read before I went to the beach, and can’t really top Olivia Nuzzi’s description of it here:
It is a portal to a private world that existed between Jean-Michel Basquiat and Suzanne Mallouk, his longtime girlfriend. The book is told in novella style from Mallouk’s point of view, filtered through the prose of her close friend, Clement. It would be wrong to call it a love letter, but it is a portrait of an artist by an artist who respected him as a human being, and so, whether a passage describes him at his very best and kindest or his most destructive and infuriating, it is inflected all the same with a deep love and acceptance.
Though I might add that there’s a sort of Lana Del Rey quality to this book; e.g., someone in real life gave Mallouk the nickname “Widow Basquiat” years before Jean-Michel Basquiat died.
Lastly, I finished Walter Isaacson’s biography of Benjamin “Brilliant Guy, Terrible Spouse?” Franklin. While this is hardly the most important thing, please check this letter sent by Charles Fox, the British foreign secretary, at the end of the Revolutionary War, when Franklin was getting ready to negotiate the peace treaty:
“I know your liberality of mind too well to be afraid that any prejudices against Mr. Grenville’s name may prevent you from esteeming those excellent qualities of heart and head which belong to him, or from giving the fullest credit to the sincerity of his wishes for peace.”
…and tell me that doesn’t sound exactly like Jane Austen! Like that may even be IN an Austen novel.
A note on all this
Thanks for subscribing. Hope you enjoy. The goal here is just to offer up some links you may have missed, and maybe the occasional commentary on something in politics or a book I may have read that you, the reader, might enjoy. If you have thoughts on any of this, hit me up at katherinemillernyc@gmail.com or just tweet at me.